


How you feel

by Tuii



Series: Polarity [1]
Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Established Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mania, Medication, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Pre-Evak, Sexuality Crisis, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Therapy, mention of Sonja
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 17:31:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13276410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tuii/pseuds/Tuii
Summary: Being bipolar is some kind of version of hell. Even when you’re a good boy and take your meds every day and follow your routine, it can fuck you up in no time and really badly. Venlafaxine in the morning to get him going and valproate and quetiapine in the evening to make sure that he doesn’t get too excited and that he actually can sleep because of the anxiety.





	How you feel

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, please read the tags. This is my version of what Even has gone through with his illness. I'm bipolar as well and you could say that writing this is kind of a therapy project for me since I'm going to use my own experience while writing this. This will have all the angst and I really hope you read this only if you're in a good head space. It can be a lot to handle. This will be a series that describe things that happen to Even, how he sees his derpessive and manic episodes and things that happend during them. It won't be pretty, it won't be fluffy and happy.

The feeling in your chest is weird, like someone is sitting on it. Or like it has a pile of stones that you just can’t move on your own but at the same time you don’t know are you worthy of anyone helping you with them. He knows that he has people rooting for him, people that love him and people who would do anything if it would make things easier for him, help him breathe for example. But the little voice in his head gets more loud during days like this, it gets more vocal and it almost screams and covers everything else under it. He knows that the little, or in this case, loud voice has nothing to do with reason, that it keeps telling him lies, but still he listens to it, trusts it.

 

Being bipolar is some kind of version of hell. Even when you’re a good boy and take your meds every day and follow your routine, it can fuck you up in no time and really badly. Venlafaxine in the morning to get him going and valproate and quetiapine in the evening to make sure that he doesn’t get too excited and that he actually can sleep because of the anxiety. It can give you to huge highs that make you do things that you wouldn’t normally do. Spend ridigulous amounts of money, have sex with strangers without protection, decide you don’t need sleep at all, you may be loud and vocal and irritable, angry at everyone and everything without a reason. It can also mean that you can’t get out of bed, that you don’t want to eat at all or that you want to eat everything, it can make you feel like nobody loves you and that you’re just a burden to everybody in your life so you need to end your life. Which leads into a hospital visit and seeing the pain in your family’s eyes. And it might be that you’re so sad yourself that you can’t feel sorry for how you make your closest family feel. That there is nothing at all in you, that there is just black inside you, that you kill everything you touch.

 

And if you’re very (un)lucky, you’ll have the version of this illness that makes things spiral in a very fast pace, like in one hour you can feel the all time high and the all time low. It makes you question every feeling you have, makes you wonder are you alright if you are happy or sad or are you getting hypomanic or depressed. Although he has lived with this for years now, it still can get the best of him at times. He still finds him questioning himself for the decisions he makes, thinking if he is getting into a hypomania when he feels good and has an amazing work flow or is getting down when he just wants to sleep more and everything feels gray. And the problem is that it doesn’t help if others say that ”it’s just normal life, everyone has bad days or good days”, because the thing is that he needs to feel it in him, needs to know it in his bones. Yes, he has an therapist, has had since the beginning and it helps, but there still are things that he feels like only he knows about his illness. Because only you can know how you feel.

 

He had lived with this illness since he was 17. Someone could say he was too young to get it but then again, it usually hits at that age. When you’re young and an easy target for this, when everything is messy already because of the hormones and stuff and the last thing you need is a manic episode. His first one could have been worse, much worse, and in a way he's happy that it wasn’t. Although the one he had was bad enough for him. It broke him for years and it took years to get the pieces back together again. He had lost his best friends for a too long time because of it, he had to renew his last year of high school and it broke his relationship with Sonja. The first episode didn’t help him find his sexuality, at all. Having feelings towards his best friend and actually acting on them was so easily said to be part of his manic episode. But he had those feelings for so long before the episode, he did know that it wasn’t just the episode talking but trying to convince others about that was more difficult. Especially Sonja was determened that it was just the episode although he tried to tell her that it had more than just a want to try things. It was actual feelings. That he didn’t care about about the gender but the person under the gender. That he was pansexual.

 

But after his first episode he was so drained that arguing about being heterosexual or pan was too hard. He wanted to believe that Sonja and his parents believed him when he said he was pan but somewhere deep inside he knew that this would be something that would blow up in his face later. After the mania that led him to go crazy on Bakka’s fFB page the depression hit. The humiliation, the looks from other students, the messages from his friends that he couldn’t read because of shame, the feeling of being the worst disappointment ever born or lived on this earth. He was 17 and it felt like his life was already over. He listened the doctor tell him what being bipolar meant. That he would be on meds for the rest of his life, that he needed to take care of his sleeping routines, not to drink preferably at all and that although he would be on meds, it was a possibility that the episodes would happen again. That he would need to tell his closest friends about the symptons that were those that may mean an episode. And all he could think was how humiliating this was. That his youth was over and he would always be a freak.

 

His first depressive episode lead into a suicide attempt. Not his brightest hour, when his mom found him in the bathroom, almost gone but still here for some reason. If he had thought that getting diagnosed with bipolar was horrible, it was nothing compared to the feeling he had when he woke up in the hospital under suicide watch. The first few moments were horrible because he realised that he had failed also in killing himself. Couldn’t he do anything right anymore? Of course not, he was a huge disappointment in every way and to everyone. His parents and Sonja visited after he was out of the suicide watch and he wanted to die again when he saw the pain in their eyes. He ended up staying in the hospital for a month and getting new meds and ordered to go to a group four times a week for 3 months.

 

This is what it means to live with bipolarity. At least this is what it means to him. Pain, shame, meds, therapy, hospital, group therapy, feeling lost, being constantly on the watch with your moods, keeping up with your routine, not having the life you thought you would have, seeing the pain in his parents' eyes, feeling like he was just a huge and constant disappointment. Having to rethink everything you had hoped for the future. Would he be able to work with movies, would that be too stressful? Did this mean that he would have to let his lifelong dreams go and just be a boring person working at McDonalds or something, not being able to use his full potential.


End file.
